Zaius, but Greene supports his arguments in interviews with the creators, who confirm some of these messages. How’s them bananas?įeel free to harrumph like Dr. He even finds meaning in the limp final installments, Conquest and Battle: In his eyes, those violent, militaristic flicks symbolize the rise of the black-liberation movement and the resultant anxieties of white liberals. In Escape, Greene sees the quashing of pacifist chimps Zira and Cornelius as a metaphor for the suppression of the Left by the Man. For a country tarnished by Asian conflicts and violent assassinations, Taylor’s mauling by the apes symbolized America’s fall from grace. And what’s even scarier than Charlton Heston in a loincloth is that Greene makes an utterly plausible case for his theory.įor instance, Greene, a Los Angeles writer, feels it was no coincidence that Heston, ”a film icon of white heroic strength and Western indomitability,” starred in the first film as the cynical astronaut Col. Instead, they were increasingly politicized manifestos about America during the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s. To him, the Apes movie series wasn’t merely five goofy-scary sci-fi flicks about life before and after the apocalypse. ‘Planet of the Apes’ as American Myth sounds like one of those irony-steeped college courses, but it’s hardly monkey business. Planet of the Apes academic Eric Greene deconstructed the mythology in his book Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1996.

What does planet of the apes symbolize